Social Networking

Mental Health

You never forget the moment you meet someone. I was living with my Godfather after my previous relationship had left me basically homeless. I was hanging out in Gorean chat rooms online. The chat rooms consisted of people who role played scenarios out of the 1960s John Norman Gor Novels and discussed the Master / slave philosophy that existed within those books.

I had become friends with many of the participants of these chat rooms. We gathered online every day and talked both among a group and privately. But, there was one man who stood out to me most. He was well-respected within our circles. He tended to come into a room and take it over. Often eliciting deep philosophical discussion from participants. His opinions on the topics we’d discuss were always backed by quotes from the Gorean novels that illustrated his point.

To be in a room when he spoke meant to be respectful.

He never engaged in arguments, only discussions. The way he illustrated his thoughts and opinions on the subject matter reminded me of a Preacher giving a sermon and quoting bible verses.

I came to know him on a more personal level, when, in a role play setting, I approached his feet, knelt in front of him and asked him to teach me how to be a better slave. I spent my days learning the details of a lifestyle that had been formed around these novels and was intent on learning from him.

As time passed, I became friends with a couple that lived just outside the town he lived in. I decided to go for a visit. Since he would be close by, I asked him to be my safe call in case anything went wrong. During that visit I had the opportunity to meet him when we all went out to dinner together.

The moment he walked up, I was smitten with him.

Smitten in that school girl crush type way where your words get twisted up before they can come out of your month and you flush with embarrassment because you’re sure you’ve said something stupid or silly.

He sat across from me at a small round table inside a strip club that we had met at as a group. His date sat next to him, and just looking at her, you were almost certain she worked there. His long black hair was slicked back in a well-groomed ponytail. He was wearing jeans, a black bowling shirt with blue flames running down the front of it and a pair of doc martens.

I weighed 420 lb. I had on a longish black dress that I thought would help slenderize me a little, pantyhose and these horrific black platform shoes. The shoes had about a four-inch-high large square heel on the bottom. I could hardly walk in them. My pantyhose were too small and created a situation where they kept riding down from my waist to my knees.

I was as fidgety a nervous teenage girl with her first boy crush.

I don’t remember anything else about the other three people who were sitting at the table with us. My focus was completely on him. I kept accidentally kicking him underneath the small table each time I tried to shift in my seat or cross my legs in a different direction. Each time I did it, he’d break in the conversation, look over at me. I’d make an apologetic face or mouth that I was sorry, and he’d nod and go about his conversation.

I kicked him several times. Completely unintentionally, I could not stop shifting around in my seat. Finally, at one point he reached under the table, grabbed my ankle, shook it a little and then gave me a little pat on the leg and smiled at me in a way that told me it was okay, and he wasn’t upset. His touch shocked me. Literally, I felt a spark. It caught me off guard. One of the most notable men in our community just touched me. I was so flustered that I excused myself from the table.

I went outside to get some fresh air and calm down my girly swooning.

Standing outside, my pantyhose had rolled down again. I ducked behind a car in the jam-packed parking lot to try to pull them back up as I gathered myself and tried to collect myself enough to go back inside.

“Do you often stand outside with your dress hiked up and your pantyhose at your knees? Some men would take this as a very clear opportunity to have their way with you.”

I froze. The red flush of embarrassment rushed from my toes to the top of my head. I didn’t know what to say. I looked over at him. He chuckled at me.

“It’s alright, don’t worry about it. Most women take off their clothes the first time I touch them. Finish what you are doing and come back inside with me. You shouldn’t be out here alone.”

A few months later, I was his property.

But, not in the typical way that a woman was a man’s property within our circles. We had what he often described to others as a platonic master/slave relationship. I was a house slave. I ran his house, or more accurately his online chat room. It was my job to make sure other girls knew what they were doing when they entered. I worked on his website, collected quotes for his discussions and wrote articles for his online magazine. I hosted an online radio show for him each week.

We spoke often. Usually at least twice a day. Before too long, he had not only become my Owner, but my best friend. A few months later, I was involved in a situation in the chat room where my actions had upset one of the male patrons. As a result, I was upset, distressed, and stressed out about it. Because, in my eyes, I had failed to be perfect and I beat myself up over it emotionally.

Due to my emotional state, he suggested that I should take a break. Come to his house for a visit. Spend some time with him and work on relaxing, refreshing my soul, and rekindling my spirit. I did that. I went and spent two weeks with him in Portland. We spent time together, I cooked for him. I straightened up the house. We watched movies and sat on the couch and he laughed every time my head hit the pillow and I feel asleep without ever seeing the movie I had picked to watch.

Everything changed for me during that trip.

When I returned home I kept telling myself that someday I was going to lose all my weight and I was going to find someone exactly like him to own me. I fell into a little bit of a depression though I didn’t really know why.

I was talking to one of his friends on the phone, trying to explain what I was feeling. “When are you going to tell him?” he asked me.

“Tell him what?” I questioned.

“That you are in love with him of course.”

My brain spun. How did he know? I had hidden it from everyone. I hadn’t told anyone how I felt. If he knew, if he found out, he would surely reject me. Of this I had no doubt. Days passed as I struggled inside with what to do. I’d seen the women he dated, the women he chose to be with. I wasn’t his type. I was a good friend, a good slave, he valued that. But, he’d never choose to love me back. I was afraid to tell him. Afraid that there was a chance that telling him I was in love with him might ruin what we had.

That conversation is one of my fondest memories.

In fact, a couple of years later it became the topic of a song titled “You’re My Everything” that I wrote and one of his best friends sang at a gathering we held San Francisco. The song was my gift to him on our three-year anniversary.

I called him up in tears. “I have to tell you something,” I admitted.

“I’m listening,” he confirmed.

“I’m in love with you. I know I shouldn’t be. I know you don’t want me to be. But I am.” I said before I broke down crying.

“I know.” he confirmed in a way that was egotistical, arrogant, relieving, and sexy all at once.

“You know?” I asked. “How could you know? I didn’t know until very recently. I haven’t told anyone. It’s been eating away at me. If you knew, why on earth didn’t you tell me?”

“I thought it was something you should figure out for yourself.”

“So, what happens now?” I asked timidly.

“Now, we start to figure out what we can do about it.”

Six months later I was moving to Portland.

We decided that we needed to be closer while we figured it out. I had started my career as a phone sex operator. As a result, I was making enough money to be on my own. He had found me an apartment to move into just a few miles away from where he lived, and although it was my apartment, he was there all the time.

Six months after that, he was moving in and we were getting married. About six months later, we were upgrading my one-bedroom apartment to a three-bedroom apartment. Making room for his daughter to have her own room, getting a puppy and happily living our lives in a 24/7 TPE (Total Power Exchange) relationship.

A year later we were moving into the house he had been staying in when we met. We had a rent to own lease on the house that allowed us to live in it for four years while saving up to purchase it at the end. I wanted to own that house. Because, it was the perfect house for us. Our life was perfect. We were happy. Everything was going well.

We had seven amazing years together before things started to change.

Dating for two, married for five. Seven years that I wouldn’t change for the world. Everything about our life was ideal.

This is the man I loved. The man I married. He was my everything. The one man who I would have done anything in the world for. But, sadly, this is the man I lost somewhere along the way.

We started to struggle with money. I resented that I was the one with all the financial responsibility. We both slipped into depression. He started having online affairs and lying about them. I started getting more resentful and angrier. I got sick. He got sick. I got better. He got worse. At every point that life challenged our relationship, we went in different directions. Until finally, the man I once loved was gone, and the submissive woman he once knew no longer existed.

Life circumstances and the choices we each made in dealing with them changed us.

It took us five years to get there. To get to that point that we had drifted in opposite directions. Somewhere during that time, I grieved this loss. The loss of the man I had fallen so deeply in love with. The loss of the life we had together. When I finally walked away, in truth, I was so hurt and angry and resentful that I hardly remembered those first seven years anymore.

But, I remember them now. I recall them vividly today. Now, that he is gone, and it is no longer a case of him just not being that man anymore, but him not being at all.

Death is so fucking final. It takes away any chance of a better ending.

It has taken away from me any hope I still held on to that one day he would find himself again.

Over the course of the years, I’d come to terms with the fact that he wasn’t the man that I married anymore.

But, I wanted something better for him. I wanted him to fight his disease the way I had fought mine. I wanted him to not give up on himself. And, although I knew that we’d never be together again, I wanted him to be happy. My heart wanted a better ending for us. I wanted us to be able to be the platonic friends we had once been. My heart wanted him to understand why I had to leave. I wanted him to tell me that it was okay, that he understood, and that he didn’t hold it against me.

But now, I never get those things. Instead, I must find solace in the fact that he is in a better place. That he is no longer in pain from his disease. That he isn’t feeling ill each day. Now, I must believe that in that place, where the struggles he faced no longer exist, is the man I once loved. Sleeping with angels and looking down on me with a clear understanding that he was once my everything and that even though that changed as life changed and wore on him. That man, I still love very dearly.

In “Sex, Love and Obesity Part 20,” I talked about the day I finally got in my car and drove away. I was out of the house now, and the change in my stress and anxiety levels allowed me to stop turning to drugs and alcohol as coping mechanisms and escape.

Last week, in “Dissociative Identity Disorder – Six Women One Mind,” I tried to paint you a clear picture of how my system works and of the internal struggle that was going on in my mind as I tried to decide about what happened next. I wasn’t doing well at navigating my decisions when it came to sex, love and obesity. Because, every single part of me wanted something different.

Attempting to put that all together in a cooperative decision was proving quite difficult.

Part of me was in absolute protection mode.

I wanted to avoid Peter at all costs. I didn’t feel safe anywhere near him, and I knew that if I was around him, some other part of me would get sucked back into his promises of a better future, his professions of undying love, and wind up going back for more.

My primary goal was to get as far away from him as humanly possible. My first instinct was to pack all of my stuff up and move to Dallas where I had a small group of very close friends. It made sense. My best friend, who is like a sister to me, as well as her husband and three children whom I consider my nieces and nephews are there. I would have family. Two of the women that I consider part of my “ride or die” squad live there. I would have friends. The organization that I got a large part of my fitness and wellness education from is there. I could pursue that farther. Dallas was a good place to start over.

In my mind, the small little town of Wilmington wasn’t big enough for both Peter and I. He was refusing to move out of the apartment that I had before he moved in, which was going to force me to have to move out and find another place to live. When it came to Peter (reasonable or not), I feared for my mental, emotional and physical well-being if I didn’t get that distance. I was going to move to Dallas.

Part of me was in nostalgic mode.

I wanted to avoid Peter at all costs, but I didn’t want to run away to Dallas. No, I wanted to stay with Clark. I loved Clark. I would always love Clark. Nothing was ever going to change that. The only reason that Clark and I were not together was because the relationship lacked passion and intimacy and my brain could not deal with that.

Around Clark I was calmer and more stable. There was absolutely no threat of danger. Clark provided a safety that only two other men in my life had ever provided, my Dad and my Godfather. When I told Clark that I was going to be moving to Dallas, the look on his face clearly told me that he still loved me as well. In fact, I believe that Clark will always love me. I believe that Clark’s love for me is unconditional. It doesn’t matter how many times I mess up. It doesn’t matter how many mistakes I make, at the end of the day, he will always love me.

I thought that love was enough. I had learned my lesson with Peter that amazing sex and grandiose gestures of romance were overrated. Clark truly loved me. It shouldn’t matter if our kisses didn’t feel like passionate movie moments and our sex life wasn’t something you could write smut novels about. Safety, security, stability. These were the things that counted. These were the things that made him my Superman and so clearly painted that “S” on his chest. I was going to start looking for a job where Clark lived and rekindle that relationship. I was going to move to Greensboro and stay with Clark.

Part of me was in fight or flight mode.

I wanted away from everyone. I was too twisted up inside. Nothing felt safe to me. There was no other option on the table that presented a potential result I was 100% confident in. I wanted to go “home.” Which meant going back to the once place I knew without a shadow of a doubt was safe, my Godfather’s house.

My Godfather has been the hero of my story for my entire adult life. He’s the one that got me the medical and mental health assistance that I’ve needed to survive since I was eighteen years old. His home had provided me safety and a place to find sanity the last time I struggled with a full-blown system failure like the one I was experiencing now.

My Godfather has over 20 years of experience in being involved in the life of someone with Dissociative Identity Disorder. He is the one person in the entire world, now that my father is gone, that I trust 100%. The one person I know will never hurt me, never cause me any physical or emotional pain. He is the one person I know will never break my heart. The one person I have in my corner that I know always has my best interest in heart. I was going to move back to California and stay with my Godfather until I got my brain back to a cooperative state.

Part of me wanted to fix things with Peter

I hoped that when faced with the threat of losing me, he would try to be a better man. I wanted us to go to couples’ therapy and work together to be better versions of ourselves.

While I didn’t miss the fighting and the confrontation, I missed the little things. The sweet little notes he’d leave for me, roses and flowers and cooking dinner together. I missed cuddling on the couch watching TV and the way he always smelled so good. I missed the emotional and passionate sex.

But, most of all, I missed how confident I was that he loved me. Peter was fighting for me. Nobody else had ever done that. Everyone else, my husband, Clark, they had let me go so easily.

I’ve been in a lot of long-distance relationships. There have been a lot of airport goodbyes. Each time, there would be this moment that you’re walking away and they are walking away, both going in opposite directions. In that moment, I’d look back, just to see if they looked back. I always thought, “If they look back, I know they feel the same way I do.” In fairness, most of them looked back. But, Peter was different. He never walked away. He’d stand there, watching me and not turn to leave until I was already well out of sight.

Peter had always been ready for a fight. Most of the time it was a fight with me. But, there had been a time when it felt more like a fight for me. I saw that again, now that he was about to lose me. And, since I had never really seen anyone fight for me, or fight to keep me, it was a fight that I really wanted him to win.

Part of me just wanted to throw my hands in the air and give up.

“Fuck’em, feed ‘em fish.” There is a point where you just go, “This is all fucked up.” Nothing I do is going to matter. The cards are all going to fall wherever they are going to fall. Everything is in chaos, I might as well enjoy the chaos and try to have some fun in the process. Which for me, means “I’m just going to go get my freak on.”

I wanted to feel something. Because, typically I feel nothing. A numbness exists inside me that allows me to mask pain, both mental and physical. As a teenager I used to cut myself and watch myself bleed to remind myself that I wasn’t completely numb. But, somewhere along the way I learned that sex achieved the same thing. The act itself reminds me that I am capable of feeling and breaking past the numbness. I wanted to hurt someone else. Not in a malicious way, but in a sadistic way.

I wanted to screw my brains out and play whip me beat me games in the bedroom. But, this time I didn’t want to be on the submissive end of things, I wanted to be the one in control. I wanted to be the one calling the shots. I wanted to be on the other side of the whip. So, I created profiles on alternative lifestyle websites. I started talking to men that wanted to be submissive. It was going to take some time to figure out what would happen next. All of my collective parts wanted different things. So, in the meantime, I was going to get some aggression and anger out. I was going to do what I wanted, when I wanted, with who I wanted.

Part of me wanted to prove that I was stronger than all of this.

I worked hard to get where I am. I was dead set that I wasn’t going to allow Peter, myself, or anyone else destroy that. It was time to focus on my career and the dream that I had been chasing since losing weight. I’d focus on how I could help others fight obesity and work toward my dream of owning my own fitness business. That had been the intrinsic motivation pushing me to be a better version of myself. I was going to chase that dream. Forget boys, toys, relationships, and love.

Being afraid of Peter wasn’t going to force me to run away from a town where I had established myself and built a career. I was going back to work. I’d drive the three and a half hours into town on Mondays and stay with a good friend throughout the week. Then, I would drive back to Clark’s on Fridays and spend the weekend there.

No matter where I ended up, having a job that allowed me to work remotely would be ideal. So, I was going to build that. I’d dip back into my skills in web design and graphics design, create a new website and launch my own online business. If I did that, it wouldn’t matter if I ended up in Dallas, Greensboro, California or anywhere else. My focus was on a future that didn’t involve needing any man to make me feel physically safe, emotionally stable or financially secure.

I was going to prove to everyone, including myself, that despite this set-back, I was stronger than any of this. And, I was going to use my strength to help empower others to do the same.

My life as far as love and obesity had unraveled.

Every part of me was going in a different direction. It didn’t take long before the part of me that wanted to go to Dallas conceded that probably wasn’t the best plan. The part of me that wanted to run away to California realized that wasn’t really necessary or ideal either. But, outside of those two decisions I had four very distinctly different paths.

But, before I made any final decisions, there were things to do first. I had to go to California and run this half marathon I was signed up for. Then, I needed to go to Portland and gather all of the things I’d left there when I ran away from my marriage and get all of my things to one central location. Plus, I had to go to this convention and give this presentation I was scheduled to give.

I wasn’t physically prepared. I hadn’t run in months. How, or even if, I could pull off a half marathon, was a prevalent question in my mind. My presentation was written. But, it wasn’t practiced or polished and I wasn’t mentally ready to do any of it.

I was falling apart at the seams. But, I was going to make sure that one thing happened, the world was going to see Pandora do this, and they weren’t going to know that I was hanging on to sanity by a thin little thread because my entire life had unraveled on me.